The most common sentence was three to five years in prison, with more than 16,000 new entrants sentenced to that.One caveat to the story: TRN reporter Ken Fibbe misstated the average sentence served. While it's true that "the average sentenced length was 19.2 years for all inmates," that includes inmates kept for very long sentences. The 58.3% is the amount of time served by the cohort released in 2010. Of those prisoners, their average sentence length was 8.2 years and the average time served was 4.3 years. Looking further through the document, I thought it worthwhile to mention several other interesting tidbits that jumped out.
During the 2010 fiscal year in Texas, 247 people were sentenced to life, 85 to life without parole and seven received the death penalty.
A sizable 21.6% of the active parole population (>17,500) has been under supervision five or more years.
Texas' probation population has trended slightly downward in recent years, with 419,920 under supervision in FY 2010, down from 430,840 in 2006. Of FY 2010 probationers, 247,102 were under felony supervision, with 172,818 misdemeanor probationers.
Violent offenders made up 51.2% of TDCJ prisoners onhand, but just 20% of prisoners released in FY 2010. By contrast, drug offenders made up 17.8% of prisoners onhand but 32.6% of all releases. Similarly, property offenders accounted for 16.6% of prisoners onhand but 28.5% of FY2010 releases. Hence the state is releasing drug and property offenders at higher rates in order to keep violent offenders locked up longer, which to be fair is probably what most folks want them to do.
Here are the 10 Texas counties with the most prisoners onhand in TDCJ at the end of FY 2010, accounting for 56% of all prisoners:
- Harris: 28,995
- Dallas: 18,205
- Tarrant: 10,911
- Bexar: 9,958
- Travis: 5,177
- Hidalgo: 3,173
- McLennan: 2,569
- Jefferson: 2,551
- Lubbock: 2,530
- El Paso: 2,419